VI. Cannibalism in sex.—Females who devour the male, those who devour the spermatophore.—Probable use of these practices.—Fecundation by the whole male.—Loves of the white foreheaded dectic.—The green grasshopper.—The Alpine analote.—The ephippigere.—Further reflections of the cannibalism of sex.—Loves of the praying mantis.
The spider eats her male; the mantis eats her male; in locustians, the female is fecundated by a spermatophore, an enormous genital bunch-of-grapes. She gnaws through this envelope of spermatozoides to the last shred. These two facts should be brought together. Whether the female swallow the male entire, or only the product of his genital glands, it is probably in both cases a complementary act of fecundation. There are possibly in the male, assimilable elements necessary for the development of the eggs, almost as the albumen of seeds, little aborted plants, is necessary for nourishing the vegetable embryo, surviving plantlet. Plants, according to recent study, are born twins: in order to live one must devour the other. Shifted to animal life, and slightly modified, this mechanism explains what one terms, from sentimentalism, the sexual ferocity of the she-mantis and the she-spider. Life is made out of life. Nothing lives save at the expense of life. The male insect nearly always dies immediately after the mating; in locustians he is literally emptied by the genital effort: whether the female respect, or devour him, his life would hardly be longer, or shorter thereby. He is sacrificed; why, if this is for the good of the species should he not be eaten? Anyhow, he is eaten. It is his destiny, and he feels it coming, at least the male spider does, and the male mantis allows himself to be gnawed with a perfect stoicism. The spider jibs, the other submits. It is really a matter of ritual, not of accident or of crime. One might try experiments. One might prevent the female dectic from pecking the mistletoe berry which the male has discharged on her; one might watch the coupling of mantes and isolate them immediately: and then follow all the phases from laying to hatching. If the spermatophagy of the dectic is useless, if the murder of the male mantis is useless, it will annul the foregoing reflections, and others will rise.
The white-fronted dectic is, like all the locustians (grass-hoppers), a very ancient insect; it existed in the coal era, and it is perhaps this antiquity which explains its peculiar fecundative method. As the cephalopodes, his contemporaries, he has recourse to the spermatophore; yet there is mating, there is embracing; there are even play and caresses. Here are the couple face to face, they caress each other with long antennæ "fine as hair," as Fabre says; after a moment they separate. The next day, new encounter, new blandishments. Another day, and Fabre finds the male knocked down by the female, who overwhelms him with her embrace; he gnaws her belly. The male disentangles himself and escapes, but a new assault masters him, he lies flat on his back. This time the female, lifted on her high legs, holds him belly to belly; she bends back the extremity of her abdomen; the victim does likewise; there is junction, and soon one sees something enormous issue from the convulsive flanks of the male, as if the animal were pushing out its entrails. "It is," continues the best observer (Fabre, Souvenirs VI), "an opaline leather bottle about the size and colour of a mistletoe berry," a bottle with four pockets at least, held together by feeble sutures. The female receives this leather bottle, or spermatophore, and carries it off glued to her belly. Having got over the thunder-clap, the male gets up, makes his toilet; the female browses as she walks. "From time to time she rises on her stilts, bends into a ring, seizes her opaline bundle in her mandibles, and chews it gently." She breaks off little pieces, chews them carefully, and swallows them. Thus while the fecundative particles are extravasated toward the eggs which they are to animate, the female devours the spermatic pouch. After having tasted it piece by piece she suddenly pulls it off, kneads it, swallows it whole. Not a scrap is lost; the place is clear, and the oviscapte is cleaned, washed, polished. The male has begun to sing again, during this meal, but it is not a love-song, he is about to die; he dies: passing near him at this moment, the female looks at him, smells him, takes a bite of his thigh.
Fabre was unable to see the mating of the green grass-hopper, which takes place at night, but he observed the long preludes; he has seen the slow play of soft antennæ. The result of the coupling is the same as with all locustians; the female chews and swallows the genital ampulla. She is a terrible beast of prey who eats alive a huge cicada, who fearlessly sucks the entrails of a wriggling cockchafer. One can't say whether she eats her male, dead or alive; it is very probable for he is quite timid. Another dectic, the Alpine analote, has given Fabre the alarming spectacle: a male on his back, a female on his belly, the genital organs joining end to end in this single contact, and while she was receiving the fecundative caress, the enigmatic female, with the fore part of her body raised, was gnawing with little mouthfuls, another male held in her claws, impassive, his belly chewed open. The male analote is much smaller and weaker than the female; like his confrère the spider, he flees with greatest possible speed after the end of coition; he is very often nipped. In the case observed by Fabre, the meal was doubtless the end of a preceding amour: these locustians have the habit, rare among insects, of receiving several suitors. Truly this cannibal Marguerite de Bourgogne is a fine type of beast, and gives a fine spectacle, not of immorality, an empty term, but of the serenity of nature, which permits all things, wills all things, and for whom there are neither vices nor virtues, but only movements and chemic reactions.
The spermatophore of the ephippiger is enormous, nearly half the size of the animal. The nuptial feast is finished according to the same rite, and the female, having finished the leather-bottle spermatophore, adds thereto the poor emptied male. She does not even wait until he is dead; she chops him up, as he is dying, limb by limb: having fecundated her with all his blood, he must feed her with all his flesh.
This male flesh is doubtless powerful comforting to the mother to be. Female mammifers, after delivery, devour the placenta. One has given different interpretations to this habitual act. Some see a precaution against enemies: it is necessary to obliterate traces of a condition which clearly shows that one is feeble, defenceless, surrounded by young, a tasty prey at the mercy of any tooth; others say it is a recuperation of energy. This latter opinion seems more likely, especially if one consider the habits of locustians. The spermatophore is indeed the preceding analogy to the placenta. On the other hand, fecundation, before being a specific act, belongs to the general phenomena of nutrition: it is the integration of one force in another force, and nothing more. The devouring of the male, partial or complete, represents, then, only the most primitive form of the union of cellules, this junction of two unities in one, which precedes the segmentation, feeds it, makes it possible during a limited time, after which a new conjunction is necessary. If the actual acts are only a survival, if they have lasted after their utility has disappeared, it is another question, and one which I leave again to experimenters. It will be enough for me if I have gained acceptance of the general principle that animals' acts, whatever they may be, can not be understood unless one strip them of the sentimental qualifications beneath which ignorant humanity has covered them, corrupting them with providential finalism.
While fully recognizing the immense social value of prejudices, analysis should be permitted to excoriate them and to grind them. Nothing appears more dear than maternal love, and nothing is more widespread throughout all nature: yet nothing gives a falser interpretation of the acts which these two words pretend to explain. One makes a virtue of it, that is to say, in the Christian sense, a voluntary act; one seems to think that it depends on the mother to love or not to love her children, and one considers culpable those who relax or forget their motherly cares. Like generation, motherly love is a commandment; it is the second condition of the perpetuity of life. Mothers sometimes are without it; some mothers also are sterile: the will intervenes neither in one case nor in the other. As the rest of nature, as ourselves, animals live submitted to necessity, they do what they ought to do, so far as their organs permit them. The mantis who eats her husband is an excellent egg-layer who prepares, passionately, the future of her progeny.
After Fabre's observations of couples of these insects caged, the female much stronger than the male mantes, are the predatory ones, who do combat for love. The combats are deadly, the vanquished female is eaten at once. The male is bashful. At the moment of desire he limits himself to posing, to making sheep's eyes, which the female seems to consider with indifference or disdain. Tired of parade, he finally decides, and with spread wings, leaps trembling upon the back of the ogress. The mating lasts five or six hours; when the knot is loosed, the suitor is, regularly, eaten. The terrible female is polyandrous. Other insects refuse the male when their ovaries have been fecundated, the mantis accepts two, three, four, up to seven; and Bluebeard, eats them regularly after the act is accomplished. Fabre has seen better. The mantis is almost the only insect with a neck; the head does not join the thorax immediately, the neck is long and flexible, bending in all directions. Thus, while the male is enlacing and fecundating her, the female will turn her head back and calmly eat her companion in pleasure. Here is one headless, another is gone up to the corsage, and his remains still clutch the female who is thus devouring him at both ends, getting from her spouse simultaneously the pleasures ac mensa ac thoro, both bed and board from her husband. The double pleasure only ends when the cannibal reaches the belly: the male then falls in shreds and the female finishes him on the ground. Poiret has witnessed a scene perhaps even more extraordinary. A male leaps on a female and is going to couple. The female turns her head, stares at the intruder, and decapitates him with a blow of her jaw-foot, a marvellous toothed-scythe. Without disconcertion the male, wedges up, spreads himself, makes love as if nothing abnormal had happened. The mating took place, and the female had the patience to wait for the end of the operation before finishing her wedding breakfast.
The headless nuptials are explained by the fact that the insects' brain does not seem to have unique control of its movements; these animals can live without the cervical ganglion. A headless grasshopper will still lift his bruised foot to his mouth, after three hours, with the movement familiar to him in his complete condition.